Something in the world of floating have you stumped?
Show Highlights
The float industry has grown like crazy and no two centers are exactly the same. Some are opulent spas, others are small functional lounge type spaces with some tanks in it. Obviously price is a major factor in these designs, but what’s the range for the cost of a center? Certainly there’s a range, but you also want to make sure you’re not skipping out on important things like sound/water/saltproofing or proper ventilation. So how much is it really, all things considered?
Show Resources
FTS Product – Business Plan
Listen to Just the Audio
Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)
Graham: Today’s question is, “What’s a fair amount to budget for each float room’s construction, assuming middle of the road fanciness, but industry refined techniques, like green glue and double sheetrock, offset studs, waterproof flooring, FRP, a standard size, et cetera? Thanks.“
Ashkahn: A very polite question.
Graham: Yeah, it also assumes that we’re actually gonna give good answers.
Ashkahn: Hold your thanks, for a minute here. Let’s extend the question a little bit, to talk about a whole float center, because you can’t really-
Graham: Oh, I thought you were gonna talk about our lives, and what we did today. Just kind of make it a little more about us, then that floating would be nice.
Ashkahn: Because you need a lobby, you need someone to draw architectural plans. There’s a lot more that goes into starting up a float center than specifically just the construction of the float room.
Graham: And you need a float tank to put in the room.
Ashkahn: You need a float tank to put in the room. So I think it’s a little bit better to consider this in terms of your general start-up cost, which is also very much dependent on how many float rooms you’re building.
Graham: Yeah, and so this is an interesting one in itself, too. This idea of a cost per float room is a little bit deceptive, because each room that you’re adding on to your center gets successively less expensive to build out, both because you get bulk rates on the float tanks, as long as the contractor is already out on site, you’re kind of paying a fee just to have them out there, so when you’re building extra rooms, then it means that that labor gets cheaper, because they’ve already signed on for a contract, so your second room is going to be more affordable than your first. Your third room is gonna be more affordable than your first or second rooms, or all three are gonna get cheaper, depending on how you think about it. There are some economies of scale that kind of go into this, too.
Ashkahn: Yeah, and your lobby space also scales, I think, a little bit easier the bigger things get. Like the amount of extra space you need in your lobby for two float rooms instead of one is not as significant as having a lobby in the first place.
Graham: Right, yep. Yeah, exactly. So, in general though, for our kind of rule of thumb building out a new float tank center, we like to say estimate between $50-$100,000/float tank that you’re having in the center, assuming that you’re not offering any other services. That also includes having money in the bank after you open, so having some runway cash, and it assumes things going wrong, too. So having enough money set aside so that during construction you can actually pay for mistakes that are being made. And that’s a pretty big range, going from $50-$100,000 is of course doubling the budget of your float tank center, but that’s not even as high as you can go. You can easily spend a huge amount of money just decorating your lobby, and turn that into $200,000/tank that you have in your center.
Ashkahn: So those numbers kind of follow the assumptions that this question has. It’s assuming we’re not doing some crazy, insane marble walled lobby space, with beautiful interior design-
Graham: Which no one should ever do in a float tank center.
Ashkahn: … but it also assuming that you’re building the float rooms themself with some pretty substantial and serious construction, you know, the double layered sheetrock, good soundproofing, good waterproofing, all that sort of stuff. Still, the ranges can be just that big in terms of what float tank you buy. There are float tanks that are $50,000 more expensive than other float tanks, so that alone could cover that entire gap, depending on which direction you’re going, there.
Graham: Yeah, and if you’re getting up to the point where you’re paying in the $60,000 range for float tanks, you’re not even going to be able to get the kind of $100,000/room down in your final cost of the building, you know. So consider this, a lower to mid range for float tank centers, even though it sounds really high, saying that it’s going to be $300,000-$600,000 for a six tank center. It is a very large number. Again, that’s enough money to make sure that it’s actually done well, and depends a lot on your area as well, type of float tank, things like that. So there are a lot of variables, but that’s the range where you’re probably not cutting enough corners that you’re making your life miserable two years from now.
Ashkahn: Yeah, like if you were spending less than that, I would take a critical look at exactly what construction you’re choosing, and things like that. If you’re spending more than that, hopefully you know where it’s going. You’re buying pretty expensive float tanks, or you are deciding to spend a lot of money on marketing right off the bat, or you’re deciding to hire a really nice interior designer, or something like that. I will also say, when we talk to float centers after they have opened, they pretty much are in that range. Like when I talk to people, these are very much backed by not only us crunching numbers, and kind of working through construction costs, but it’s also backed by a lot of real world feedback we get from people when we see people open their float centers, and they look nice, and they did a good job. We ask them how much it took to open it that way, it’s almost always in that range, $50,000-$100,000/float tank.
Graham: Yeah, so we’ve been saying this for a long time. I think it was this last year’s industry report, maybe it was the year before, but when we were taking an average of all of the costs that it took centers to open per tank that they had, it came out to so close to this, it was within $1,000. It was like $49,000-$99,000 was the actual average that it cost all the existing centers per tank to open up. So check out the industry report as well, give us your good range. But it seems like although we were kind of just winging this and saying it offhand a few years ago, it’s turned out to actually be true, so hopefully that’s the case-
Ashkahn: Like most of our advice. It’s true after the fact.
Graham: Yeah, fortunately we’re very lucky, so I believe that compensates for the complete idiocy that normally issues forth from us. Any other details that we want to go into here, or that’s just kind of a good-
Ashkahn: I think that’s the good, rough idea of everything. I mean there’s a million details in all the construction, all that stuff-
Graham: And they can all change. Also, I’ll say I’ve heard of more centers opening that break that range on the high side recently, like in the last couple years, than before.
Ashkahn: Usually in pretty big cities, where the cost of everything-
Graham: Yeah, yeah, places-
Ashkahn: … is kind of a little bit more intense.
Graham: Yeah, absolutely, and then especially more towards downtowns of those cities, more towards big actual shopping districts, anything like that is obviously going to not only be more for rent, but more for construction, because you have to deal with all of your neighbors, and not interfering too much with public walkways, which you now have to pay money for, and things like that. Great, thank you. Thanks for the question. Again, big, broad, overview-type questions nice having out there, and if you have any others, go to floattanksolutions.com/podcast.
Recent Podcast Episodes
How to Help Float Research – DSP 300
With the push from Justin Feinstein at LIBR to get more float centers involved in research, many float center owners are chomping at the bit to push studies forward on the benefits of floating. But where do you start and how do you make it happen?
Graham and Ashkahn discuss this idea and how to do research right, as well as some of the things that might be helpful OR harmful to the world of floating in the eyes of the scientific community. There’s a lot of nuanced things to know about proper research and if you go in overzealous without considering how established science is done, it can harm the reputation of the practice.
Tips on Running Power to Float Rooms – DSP 299
Graham and Ashkahn offer some helpful tips to keep in mind when planning out the electrical framework for your float rooms. How many circuits you should plan for, where to place outlets, GFCI compliance, just to name a few.
Definitely an essential episode for anyone to listen to before going into their build-out phase.
Floating in National Media – DSP 298
Seeing float tanks in the national news and culture has increased in regularity within the last few years. Graham and Ashkahn discuss how these things get on such a large platform. The guys briefly go over some of the major stories that have been all over the media and how those stories happened. Mostly it comes down to luck, but there are a few things that can increases the chances of your float center getting on national TV.
The Real Tips on Building Your Own Float Tank – DSP 297
Someone wrote in and asked, again, despite the repeated warnings of the previous episode covering this topic, how to build a float tank properly.
Graham and Ashkahn try their best to restrain themselves and offer some practical advice about how to build your own tanks while also repeatedly warning about things to look out for when going forward with the process.
How to Handle Other Float Centers Spying on You – DSP 296
Graham and Ashkahn talk about how they deal with other float centers spying on Float On.
Basically… they don’t. The float industry is a really open community and a lot of information is generally freely available. If someone is spying on a float center, that could be a result of poor communication skills or a lack of awareness of what information is actually out there. The guys share their advice on how to talk to someone who might be in that situation and how to move forward, hopefully as friends instead of rivals.
Latest Blog Posts
Reflections from the Rise Float Gathering
Over this past weekend, a good chunk of the Float Tank Solutions and Float Conference crew ventured to St. Louis, MO for the first ever Rise Community Float Gathering. Beyond our excitement to see old friends and meet new ones, we were thrilled to be able to attend a float event that we didn’t have to plan.
When it comes to float tanks, we often deal with a lot of the “what” and the “how” of things – what do I need to do to open a float center and how to I make everything work? We write blogs and put out content. We spend our days thinking about conference flowcharts, water chemistry, detailed business plans, soundproof insulation, etc.
Rise, on the other hand, focused on the “why?”
The Story Behind the Float Marketing Forum
Over the past few years, primarily through feedback received from conference attendees and through industry survey responses, float center owners struggled with and wanted a solution to one thing… marketing. It makes sense – if there’s one thing every center needs (besides salt), it’s a solid flow of customers in tanks.
After some brainstorming with Ashkahn, we’ve decided the best solution for this year was to host a series panels covering key marketing topics that will provide the biggest impact in growing your float center business.
Introducing: The Float Conference Marketing Forum.
Announcing the 2nd Ever Start-a-Center Giveaway WINNER!
In what was one of the most difficult decisions that we had to make as a team… and after sorting through nearly 200 entries… we’ve decided upon a winner in our second ever Start-a-Center Giveaway.
Read more to learn who we’ll be guiding through the process in starting a float tank center in their community.
Gut your space before construction!
One line we don’t think you should cross is this: as much as possible, when building out your float center, gut it completely. Start from scratch.
At least then the mistakes you make are your own and your building will hold fewer surprises down the line. There are many benefits that you may not think of immediately. In this post, we’ll guide you through some of them.
